Tufts of smoke loosely billow past the two of them, the vapors of the cremation pushing past his nose, settling on his skin, and further dirtying it with the destruction that they leave in their wake.
It’s been another day. Canta still hasn’t slept.
He pushes himself up off of the ground, sweat dripping down his shaking arms as he stares with wide eyes down at the dirt beneath himself. He breathes in, taking in a large amount of the loosely drifting particulate.
After running for the rest of the night, they finally managed to escape the encroaching flames of the fire, which had spread its way out behind them, consuming the entire forest and everything in it. The entire woodland and everything in it had been taken by the red.
The trees, the animals, the houses, the people – everything.
He lowers himself down in a push-up, sweat dripping from his forehead. He pushes himself up again. Something cold presses itself against his face. Alleluia’s fingers gently press against his eyelids, closing them. “You need to blink,” she instructs.
Canta closes his eyes, keeping them closed as he lowers himself down again. He still hears the screams.
It’s not that he isn’t used to death and pain; he’s quickly adapted to the carnage that this new life of his entails, he thinks. But last night was different. These last few days have been different.
With closed eyes, he lowers himself down again. He had misjudged the situation. He had misjudged everything. He was right to be paranoid. His paranoia is what has kept him alive this entire time. Then again, this latest situation was his fault entirely. He was stupid; he was…
– He pushes himself back up. A metal hand places itself underneath his body, stopping him from doing another repetition. The voice of the palatinos, his ‘combat-instructor’ rings through his head. ‘Your sin is greed.’
The memory of her voice is interrupted by a metallic chiming from just next to him. “Your arms are going to fall off, wiggly-worm.”
“That’s not how it works,” replies Canta. But he lets his arms fall slack nonetheless and hangs there limply, his knees on the dirt, his chest suspended in the air painfully atop her cold palm. The side of his sweaty, soot covered head rests against her arm.
“Do you want to rest? I can carry you while you sleep,” she offers.
Canta opens his eyes and pushes himself off of the ground, dusting himself off as he rises to his feet. “No, thanks.”
“You need to sleep.”
“I’m fine,” says Canta, helping her up. “I’ll sleep when we get somewhere safe.”
Alleluia looks at him. “Just because your body can heal doesn’t mean your mind can. You need to sleep. It’s been days now. I’m worried.”
He’s flattered by her care, but his sleep deprivation also makes him cranky in the presence of such an annoying emotion as ‘worry’. But he does his best to fight that down. He shakes his head, walking onward. “As soon as we get somewhere safe,” he assures her. In truth, he knows that she’s right. Even his regenerating body needs sleep. His muscles feel fine. But his mind and thoughts are foggy. Apart from that, he’s getting hungrier and hungrier.
Canta grabs a handful of leaves from a low-hanging branch and begins chewing on them, if only to have something to keep himself busy. His eyes, red and itchy from a mixture of the smoke and from not blinking, stare off straight ahead of him.
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What has he done? Simply by the nature of his existence, and simply by escaping the city, he’s unleashed a wave of destruction in all directions. It sounds odd to think about, maybe even cruel, but he quietly wishes to himself that they had never left the dungeon. Right now, he would like nothing more than to lay there with her, atop a bundle of old, smelly clothes, listening to the sounds of their bodies echo out between the pipes.
Those were the good old days.
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Their journey takes them far, far away from the capital, far away from the fire, and far away from their pursuers, whom they have long-since lost in the chaos.
For days they walk through the forest. Canta subsists off of everything he can find. Worms, leaves, berries, puddle-water – Once, they find a river, and he takes the longest, most satisfying drink of his life out of it. But then Alleluia pulls him away from it just in time, as a boat full of soldiers comes over the horizon and slowly floats past them, scanning both sides of the shoreline.
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After that, a week passes. Then another.
For Canta to say that he feels like shit would be an understatement. His body is in a miserable state, and his mind is in an even odder place. Sleep takes him eventually, even if he has tried to fight it. He hangs in Alleluia’s arms like a dead man for the better part of a day.
While they run, Canta and Alleluia discuss what their plan should be. They need to recover, they need to find a safe place, they need to get him stronger, and they need to find out where the Demon-King truly resides. For all of this, they both come to the same conclusion. They need to leave the country. There is another nation to the west where the church has no power. That’s their goal.
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And then, finally, after all of this, the two of them escape the forest.
They stare, bewildered, up at the towering, ruined colossus before them. A volcano, once a proud and tall mountain that stood west of the giant-tree city, ruined after a grand eruption that had covered much of the world in soot and ash during ancient days, bringing a terrible night over every city on the continent that lasted for over a month. Canta remembers this from his history lessons.
He also remembers that it’s the western border. The mountain is neutral territory. It doesn’t belong to the church or to anyone. Grabbing Alleluia’s crank, he winds her up, and the two of them keep running, breaking out of the forest and heading over the open, fertile grasslands at the foot of the long-since dead volcano.
But their dash for freedom is interrupted.
Canta feels something move past his face — something slow, something gentle. The wind has returned to them again, now that they have breached the forest. Its calm, serene presence washes over his face like so much cleansing water, and before he knows it, he finds himself down on the grass, his back against the tree. Alleluia hovers over him, asking if he needs a minute.
He does.
Suddenly, there is a change in the air. But it is perhaps only detectable to his senses, not because of his class or because of any special, innate abilities. Rather, because of his state of mind, because of his experiences these last few weeks, and because of the many rushing thoughts and horrors and sensations that he has felt and fought against in his attempts to live up to the expectations that not only have been set for him, but that he has set for himself.
It is as if the world has shifted entirely. It is as if he had been staring into a mirror, and now he has reached through the glass, finding himself standing on the other side, looking back at the world that he had left behind.
But his eyes don’t look behind them; they gaze up towards the mountain, as the warm autumn wind pushes past his face, carrying the first of the moisture away.
Canta is the sin-eater, the chosen one of the godly spirits of gluttony, a person called by the divine. He had rejected that calling from the start in his eagerness to just want to live a new life, to make a new him. But now, as he sits here, as the wind pushes past them, removing the smell of the smoke which lingers in his hair, its soft blowing in his ears removing the sounds of the screams still buried in them, its drying of his eyes removing the visions of the true-mutilation that he has experienced first hand, in ways that are far beyond what his still normal-human mind is able to process, Canta leans back against the tree, as it all becomes too much.
What happens after that is that he makes Alleluia promise to never say anything to anyone. The prior humiliations and degradations of his character and virtue, the embarrassing stories, the frilly clothes, the nitpicking, the bedroom stuff, the beatings he took daily during his training – all of those things feel entirely insignificant to him now in comparison with this deepest shame of his.
She strokes his head, consoling him as she promises to never tell anyone that he cried. But she also tells him that he doesn’t need to be embarrassed, telling him how jealous she is that he can do something like that.
The autumn breeze wraps itself around them, flowing off to a distant place that neither of them can ever reach, but that’s fine. After the first of the healing is done, after they share the view of the mountain for a while longer, the two of them rise to their feet and keep running, not towards the mountain, towards the obvious tunnel that leads through its base, which is obviously going to be trapped. But rather, they break off around it towards the right, making a bend as they push over the grass-lands and as they run, Canta spares only a single glance back over his shoulder to the distant fires that smolder even on this day, weeks later, solely on his behalf.
He clenches his fists, his stomach growling with an agonizing vitriol as the many pillars and plumes of smoke all seem to rise up together towards the sky, where, now that his eyes are moisturized again, he sees that they all come together into a massive, black stain that hangs over everything.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Canta hears the beating of Alleluia’s heart next to him as he runs, as the looming gestalt of what, in his mind’s eye, is the Demon-King’s shadow, presses itself down over the world.
He looks forward, watching where he’s running as he swears something to himself, now finally having a real reason, a real purpose to achieve the goal that he had been given.
The two of them escape to the west, and Canta swears that he’s going to return and eat every single tainted soul in this entire place, even if it takes the rest of his life. He’s going to eat his way through each and every one of them, as if he were working his way down a buffet, until he finally gets to the thing that he desires most.
The wretched, befouling, fetid tumor nested into the soul of the world, the Demon-King.